Letters and Papers of John Addington Symonds

Poet, essayist, and literary historian, John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) delved into every field of the humanities, writing the celebrated Renaissance in Italy and publishing translations of the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini and the Sonnets of Michelangelo and Campanella he wrote biographies of Shelley, Sidney, and Jonson, and collaborated with Havelock Ellis on a number of projects in sexology. He is remembered for his untiring efforts to loosen the restraints on homosexuals in England, and his Memoirs are the only diary of a Victorian homosexual of his stature. Symonds was a most voluminous letter-writer. It is always a marvel how he found time for so much and such varied correspondence in the midst of his ceaseless output of books.